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BBC2 21:00 Secret History of Our Streets
Prince Monalulu
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01jt9bv
1 of 6 Starts with Deptford high street.
Using Charles Booth's poverty maps as a jumping off point.
In 1886 Charles Booth embarked on an ambitious plan to visit every one of London's streets to record the social conditions of residents. His project took him 17 years.
This series takes six archetypal London streets as they are now, discovering how they have fared since Booth's day.
1 of 6 Starts with Deptford high street.
Using Charles Booth's poverty maps as a jumping off point.
In 1886 Charles Booth embarked on an ambitious plan to visit every one of London's streets to record the social conditions of residents. His project took him 17 years.
This series takes six archetypal London streets as they are now, discovering how they have fared since Booth's day.
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Deptford High Street
Camberwell Grove
Caledonian Road
Portland Road
Reverdy Road
Arnold Circus
Does look interesting.
Um, it's a programme about London, lots of people have London accents there.
i feel the same. It really brought it home that no matter what condition those houses were in, in a real community, the 'forward thinking' town planners wanted it gone. And similar houses in other areas got to stay and are now million pound properties. I wonder if there are many of these planners from the 60s and 70s who realise not only did they get it wrong, but they've made modern ghettos 10 times worse than what they were before. They should be ashamed of themselves. And it's not just London. Most cities all over the country had these idiots who were actually bribed, and offered lovely trips to high rise communities in Europe, and then came back and destroyed the whole notion of community.
I'm not saying that they shouldn't have knocked down some houses which were in a terrible condition but they just seemed to hate anything Georgian or Victorian. And to a certain degree they still do. They deliberately let listed buildings get in such a state of ill repair, they get by the protection by saying it's now unsafe. Instead of cheap concrete block buildings, we now have metal, glass and wood cladding ones, that will have the same problems and need to be demolished after 30 years. Yet those houses in the programme have survived 250 years
What particularly stood out for me was that stupid ex-councillor going on about how happy the people were when they were moved, combined with the footage of the women saying how miserable they were in the new places and that they cried every day.
I'd like to say that things are now better that sort of behaviour but I'm sure plenty of people have examples of on-going failures of consultation and high handed attitudes.
....as well as WW2. And we thought the Nazis were the enemy..:rolleyes:
Spent a fair bit of time in Deptford market as a child on Saturdays.
Councillor fella was getting right on my nips, mostly due to his accent, then what was coming out of his mouth.
Enjoyed the Pastor and his spiritual mapping being used as a metaphor.
I didn't get it as first and told him to F'off my TV screen
I have seen many programmes over the years that have shown how postwar town planners did much more damage to British towns and cities than the Luftwaffe. Was it Portsmouth that still had significant parts of the town surviving, even if damaged, but postwar they bulldozed the lot to put up bland cheap modern buildings?
And they wonder why the community spirit was lost.
Who wondered why community spirit was lost?
Some of those people had been dispersed from the same site 45 years ago, when their houses were demolished to make way for the towers.
I wouldn't have the town planners' jobs for all the tea in China - but yes, social experimentation with real people's lives makes me very angry.
(There is nothing but weeds on the site of the towers, btw; whatever the new plan for housing in the area was, the money seems to have dried up; so now an area that didn't really need any more of it has more wasteland.....)
It is very noticeable with prefabs. Many people have been forced to move out prefabs even though they had a real community spirit on the estates and they liked the houses which though small were very comfortable inside. But the planners thought they should go and demolished many against the wishes of the people living there.
Not in my gran's old street, the council just temporarily moved everybody out of their prefabs, knocked them down, replaced them with bungalow's and then moved everybody back in exactly where they were before. All except my grans next door neighbour who had bought his prefab and wouldn't move out so he's still there sounded by modern bungalow's. Other than that it was all very efficient, of course it happened in 1990, if it had been 1970 they would probably have built a load of tower blocks instead.
Can I echo everything you have said....and to add that I found it an extremely depressing to watch a community destroyed in such a fashion.....just criminal.
I'm tempted to knock on his front door....tell him I'm from the Council...and that we're going to build a tower block right next door to his twee little country cottage :mad:
The City of Bath is another example:
"in the 1960s local council officials in Bath took it upon them themselves to draw up plans to demolish large swathes of artisan housing while retaining the set pieces such as the Royal Crescent. As a result, hundreds of small Georgian houses, of the kind that it is nowadays everyone’s dream to live in, were brutally bulldozed."